Chinese New Year projections light up Sydney

Posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

Sydney’s George Street was turned into a mini-Hong Kong with stunning coloured projections during January’s Chinese New Year celebrations to welcome in the Year of the Dragon.

The City’s 2012 Twilight Parade was bigger and better than ever, with dazzling illuminations projected onto some of Sydney’s most iconic buildings along the Parade route.

More than 2,500 local and international performers took in the Twilight Parade, with crowds of 100,000 people lining the city streets to catch a glimpse of the vibrant floats, dancers, martial artists, dragons, acrobats and more.

Mandylights was initially asked by the City of Sydney to provide ‘building illumination’ but Mandylights suggested they move away from generic site lighting.

“We showed them how custom projection could really make an event much more special and they loved the idea,” he said.

The Martin MACIII Profile which offers greater output than other profiles in its class, improved colour vibrancy, exceptional gobo and animation effects, and a wide zoom range was the ideal choice.

A dozen Martin MACIII were positioned within towers custom made by Mandylights; eight near the Town hall and four by the Entertainment Centre. Custom made gobos of Chinese-inspired imagery such as dragons and lanterns were used.

“We were really surprised by how much output we got from the MACIII’s,” remarked Richard. “With one MACIII we could project an image over the whole of one side of the Woolworths building opposite the Town Hall.”

The MACIII’s were programmed on a MA Lighting grandMA console with Alex Grierson creating some cool programming involving dragons chasing each other and lanterns floating around buildings.

Mandylights also created their own dragon float from 220 LED tubes which were time coded and played back in time to music and this was programmed by a grandMA2 onPC is with a two port node.